« Posts tagged fiberglass

Foam arrived, finally.

December 2, 2010 / posted in Empennage, Wings / No Comments

1.5 hours.

Cut and glassed in the emp tip foam inserts. This damned foam took nearly a month for Aircraft Spruce to get it to my house. It was backordered, then backordered again, and I finally got it today. They sent me a 2×4′ sheet of it too, and I’m pretty sure I ordered a lot less of it. Oh well.

This was easy enough, cut out some foam bits that fill the shape of the fiberglass tips, closing them off to outside elements. Mostly. I applied fiberglass and foam with the tips clecoed on so when the resin dries, I can pull them off and the tips will stay the shape they where when clecoed on. A couple of layups on the inside of the foam block and some micro filler frosting on the outside and those will be done. Then I don’t have to see the empennage again for a while.

Since I had some resin in the pot, I used up all the rest of my cut scraps to glass in the Archer VOR antenna in the wingtip, something I’d been planning to do for a long time but never got around to it. I did two layups on that, which should be enough to hold it in place, it’s not structural, just something to keep the antenna from flopping around in the wingtip. Another thing done.

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November 29, 2010 / posted in Fuselage / No Comments

4 hours.

Got the emp fairing done, or at least as done as it needs to be, for now. It needs paint, and maybe another round of micro, but it looks OK as far as I can tell. I had to install the elevators to figure out the control horn cutout, but smart-monkey was in charge instead of impulsive dumb-monkey and I got them perfect on the first try. I got the fairing countersunk, then got the platenuts installed on the VS and HS. Oh, and packing tape sucks. The packing tape I had on the aluminum to protect it from epoxy sticking there did its usual trick and ripped apart when I tried to take it off. A little bit of cajoling with the heat gun and making sure to stop and pull it all off evenly helped. Then I took the tail pieces off, but of course, I forgot to do the lower emp fairings, which I currently can’t find. Next time.

Grumble.

November 17, 2010 / posted in Empennage, Fuselage / No Comments

3 hours.

Aircraft Spruce, for some reason, has twice screwed up getting me my foam that I need to do the empennage tips. OK, fine, plenty of other stuff to do. Like the empennage fairing. This is a fiberglass piece that fits over the place where the tail section is bolted to the fuselage. In theory, you have to pop this on there, drill the holes you need to drill, and fill in whatever gaps are left with flox or some other structural filler. The problem arises when the fit sucks so bad the part looks like it belongs on a different airplane. The only recourse at this point is to start hacking up the fairing and making it fit. Fortunately, fiberglass lends itself very well to this. I had to excise a whole section where the curve of the fairing conflicted with the vertical stabilizer and threw the fit of the whole thing into the toilet. The other thing that had to be done was the part had to be split into two pieces at the front vertical curve. Now it fits. Oh, also, there’s a scribe line around the edges of this part that’s a guide for trimming away the excess. Wish I’d seen that before I started butchering the fairing. With the excess cut away, the fit might have been good enough to just fill the gaps along the edges. I’m tempted to order another fairing and start over. Either that or I’ve bought myself a good 10 extra hours of fumbling around with multiple layups and a crapload of sanding.

But I have to go out of town for five days on business, to rainy, possibly snowy Vancouver BC, so the next chance I get to mess with this thing will be next Monday.

Grumble.

I need five uninterrupted hours to do the glassing. I’m not going to get that.

More emp tips.

November 7, 2010 / posted in Empennage / No Comments

3 hours.

Not much today. I did the elevator tips, short of the wet work on the ends. I have to do the counterweight balances before I can rock those out. I’m in the middle of trimming the rudder bottom so it fits right on the flanges, but that’s not getting riveted until the connections are made for the strobe and pos light, and THAT’s not getting done until the light is installed. The rudder bottom will probably have to wait until just before the trip to the airport.

A piece from here, a piece from there…

November 3, 2010 / posted in Empennage / No Comments

1 hours.

Last night was one of those “what’s there to do in an hour” nights. Enough time to get something done, not enough time to make a big ol’ mess.



I got some 2″ hose clamps a couple of days ago, so I decided to finalize the cabin vent tubing. OK, as final as anything is on this project. The 2″ black tubing connects the NACA vents on the side to the SteinAir eyeballs at the panel. You twist them one way, air blows out. Twist them the other way, nothing. Just like the ones in airliners. I tested them, they both work and they dont’ seem to leak, but I need to check that. Cold drafts (draughts?) at altitude are bad, because they’re an annoyance that can make a flight suck for a non-rugged-individualist passenger.

After that, I trimmed and drilled the fiberglass tip for the vertical stabilizer. These need to be closed at the back end with some kind of filler, but I didn’t want to make a fiberglass/epoxy mess at 9pm on a weeknight. The crap part is, the filler needs to be put in place while the tip is in place, because there’s no other way to ensure the proper shape due to the tip’s flexing when not pinned down. The VS might have to come off for this, but before it does, I’ll drill the hole necessary for the tail and strobe wires.

Emp Tips.

November 2, 2010 / posted in Empennage / No Comments

.5 hours.

I’m trying to get back into the rhythm of doing something, anything, once a day. On my list of odds and ends has been the fiberglass empennage tips, and I’ve been avoiding it because I hate fiberglass and there was always something more important to do. This morning, I did the easiest of the 6 empennage fiberglass parts, the rudder tip:

Easy enough. Cut off the excess with a Dremel, drill, countersink for CS4-4 pop rivets, rivet on. There may or may not be later stages of filler, but at this point, it’s done, it’s on, and it won’t come off. The other tips will need a bit more work, since there’s trimming, and a need to reinforce them. The elevator tips need to be covered up and filled once the counterweights are drilled for balance. But then that’s DONE, and then it’s all about wiring and firewall forward.

More odds and ends.

October 26, 2010 / posted in Empennage, Fuselage / 1 Comment

2 hours.

I’m waiting for parts from the Mothership, so it’s all about what I can find to do while I’m waiting. Mostly I sat out there puzzling out wiring runs. The floor panels are in already, so I might have a nice game of Go Fish to look forward to when it comes to running wires for 2 GPS antennae (yes, 2, in case I get hold of a GNS 430W), trim servo, strobe unit power, tail light, then strobe wires forward for the wingtip strobes. What I did actually get done was finally rivet the reinforcing angle that the tank brackets attach to just forward of the main spar. I can’t believe I forgot to do that during wing mating, but I think I probably had other things on my mind at that point. So that’s done, and there are little blobs of torque seal on the accompanying thru-bolts to tell me I don’t have to worry about it anymore. Oh.. remember this thing? F-697?


It’s the canopy jettison bracket. I put it on the subpanel because I was just following the directions. Then I realized I’m not going to install the canopy jettison system (weight, complexity, etc). Now I realize that thing might get in the way if I have to chop holes in the subpanel for some deep avionics, like a GNS 430W or some other surprisingly large piece of gear I think I need. So I took it out. You can never have too much practice drilling out rivets.

After that, I fiddled around with the fiberglass rudder tip, and worked on the mounting system for the tail position/strobe. This is genius. At some point, I bought a length of 1/4″ aluminum dowel from the hardware store. What I did was cut 2 half-inch lengths of it, which I’ll drill and tap to 4-40, the same thread as the tail light mounting screws. I’ll put some dimples in the sides of them, then sink them into blobs of flox in the rudder bottom. At that point, they’ll be permanently affixed and I’ll still be able to unscrew them to change bulbs. OH, thumbs down on the build quality of the rudder botttom. The two halves of the rudder bottom don’t exactly line up along the seam, so I’m going to have to clean it up with micro and sandpaper. If I was exceptionally skilled with sheet metal, I’d make my own out of aluminum, but I’m not, so I’ll deal.

Finally, I messed around with the tailwheel springs. I’m going to need to order new chain. I should have looked at the plans. I remember them going together completely differently, and it took me some time to figure out that getting the chain directly on to the spring is no big deal. But the puzzle fooled this monkey, and I missed ‘Castle’ for nothing.

I’m going to pester Tim again this week and see what the deal is with my cylinders.

Some old business.

August 3, 2010 / posted in Fuselage / No Comments

Remember how I said I wasn’t going to give you a play by play of all the iterations of goop? I lied. Here’s some pics of the process.

First round of sanding. This is just the black flox-resin buildup. I grabbed some stiff foam pipe insulation (redneck water noodle), a section about a foot long, from the hot water recirc pipe on the side of the house then wrapped it in sandpaper, which gave me a flexible sanding block with about the right radius for the fairing.


A few rounds after this point, I was ready for some glass.


Here are two of the strips of crowfoot laid out on the plastic, getting ready for wetting.


Yes, it is actually me building this thing.

The black electrician’s tape is the point at which I’d like to stop getting fiberglass goo all over the skin.   Forward of this,  I covered it with clear packing tape, which was a HUGE mistake, or at least it’s a huge mistake to use the cheap stuff.   I wound up picking most of it off with my fingernails in a time-consuming, arduous process that I’m not eager to repeat.   Word on the street is that the black vinyl tape plumbers and HVAC guys use (not duct tape) is perfect for this.  It also takes a couple of hits from sandpaper without turning into a scored mess.

Another shot of me.   Are you not entertained?

This time, I put the peel-ply on in little strips, which yielded much better results than trying to wrap long strips of dacron around that compound curve.

This shot, you saw in the last post.   This is after glass and before the next layer of flox, used to fill the divots.   After that layer, I switched to micro.   All of it tinted black.. Nasty stuff.

More Canopy fairing

July 12, 2010 / posted in Fuselage / Comments Off

5 hours.
Another combination entry, since you all don’t need a play by play on the iterations of goop happening with this canopy fairing, but beginning 7/2 and ending today I’ve done the final shape of the radius, put down 4 layups of 8-oz crowfoot glass, and a fill/smoothing layer of black-tinted micro. Shelley’s real good with cloth, so she helped do the layups, which was a bonus since it took 2 of us to get a canopy-wide strip of wet glass on there. I used the plastic-sheet/squeegee method to prepreg the cloth and we laid them up wet. That stuff stretches like crazy when it’s wet, because the weight of the resin pulls at it, as well as having part of it stuck while you’re positioning something else.. But the magic sponge did its job.. I was able to get everything to lay flat and the edge came up to the electrical tape boundaries I’d made.

This is after the peel-ply came off and I hit it with some 60-grit. I”m not going to show you every iteration of sanding, because I use my iPhone for music in the shop and I don’t want to get it full of dust, but suffice it to say that there are many iterations of this. Right now, there’s a bunch of black micro hopefully slathered into all the low spots, and tomorrow morning I get to sand it all smooth. I hope this works.

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